worrying about each image

Who knows what images can do? Some make people completely stupid, others seem to arouse the life of the spirit, creating a sort of breath which stirs the mind and forces it to question the power of light and chaos. Others console the viewer by enabling him to recognise himself in them, while others fill him with fear and force him to look away and talk about something else. Sometimes the same image fulfils these roles in turn from one moment to another, according to whether or not the viewer knows how to look at them. It thus appears pointless to claim to identify a priori the universal truth of the Image, to denounce it as a sham, transgression, capture, narcissistic isolation, or to praise its incarnation, sublime beauty, value in justifying existence, the vital knot of the real and the symbolic, crushing in each case the singularity of each image beneath this pre-ordained knowledge. It is thus tempting to claim on the contrary that there is no such thing as the Image in general, only sculptures, paintings, films, photographs, and mental images, each requiring its own explanation. This is an ascetic, yet frustrating position, given that we live in a civilisation where the barriers between registers of images, or between registers of images and discourse, are becoming ever more artificial. What is art history for if it doesn’t teach us (above all?) to see today’s reality, to read its images and to let ourselves be struck by that aspect of them which passes our power to see and to read?

We met Georges Didi-Huberman to ask him to help us to escape this double bind. From the Quattrocentro to Hantaï and Penone (or vice versa), from Charcot to Deleuze and Foucault, from Panofsky to Warburg, from angelic beauty to photograms of the Holocaust, his writings reflect a twofold concern: underlining how much we don’t know what images can do, and refusing to renounce expressing what certain particular images can teach us beyond themselves, across the centuries and across the disciplines. This is why his ongoing oeuvre goes beyond all registers. Following Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg, it is a strangely untimely art history, made of ghosts, survivors, passages, and shifts. It is a philosophy of the image which crosses all fields of knowledge and questions the claims of the concept to make too much of striking images in the name of their essential truth. It is a psychoanalysis of the image which, at the risk of blurring its cardinal distinctions, moves forward into the obscure zone where images and symbols, health and insanity, become indistinguishable. It is a poetics of the image which, following Baudelaire, Bataille, and Blanchot, first requires us to learn to see and describe, while keeping an eye on the external aspect — invisible, unreadable, but never entirely unspeakable. On the horizon, it may also be a politics of the image which finally takes images seriously, trembling as if the better to respect and be haunted by the gestures that produced and inspired them, to set up a fragile barrier against the “monsters” engendered by the indifference to images of reality and their tragic dimension, as well as the “sleep of reason”.

We asked him how he came to develop a project that is both Promethean and modest, which constantly questions itself. He talked to us about heritage and life choices, forks in the road and renewals, honesty and fear, based on ceaseless work. A lesson in wisdom, with and without images.

[…]

Brief bibliography Georges Didi-Huberman has published more than thirty works, including Fra Angelico. Dissemblance et figuration (Flammarion, 1990), Devant l’image (Minuit, 1990), L’image survivante. Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Minuit, 2002), and Images malgré tout (Minuit, 2003) on the photograms torn from the hell of the Holocaust. Also worthy of note is a collective work on his thought and writings published by Minuit (with Laurent Zimmerman and Arnaud Zykner) entitled Penser par les images: Autour des travaux de G. Didi-Huberman (éd. Cécile Defaut). In 2006, Minuit published Le danseur des solitudes. Three works by Georges Didi-Huberman are forthcoming : Ex-voto. Image, organe, temps (Bayard, this coming autumn), L’image ouverte (Gallimard), and a new edition of Mémorandum de la peste (Christian Bourgois).